| Please join us as we welcome Drs. Kennda Lynch, Frances Rivera-Hernandez, and Svetlana Shkolyar for a very special panel episode that's all about NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission!
Dr. Kennda Lynch is an astrobiologist and geomicrobiologist at the Lunar & Planetary Institute, USRA, studying life in extreme environments on Earth as a model for characterizing habitable environments and searching for biosignatures on other planetary bodies in our solar system and elsewhere.
Dr. Frances Rivera-Hernandez is a planetary geologist and currently the Guarini Dean’s Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth College. In January 2021, she will be joining the Georgia Tech faculty as an Assistant Professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. Her research interprets the paleoclimate, paleohydrology, and habitability of planetary bodies by reconstructing paleoenvironments and past surface processes from sedimentary rocks and landforms. She also studies modern environments and landforms on Earth to better interpret the martian and terrestrial sedimentary record. Her research is interdisciplinary, integrating field-based studies with remote sensing and numerical analyses.
Dr. Svetlana Shkolyar is a postdoctoral fellow at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center working on life detection techniques for planetary surfaces using laser spectroscopy. This work also involves studies informing sample caching and return considerations on Perseverance Rover. Svetlana is also passionate about science communication and empowering the next generation of planetary explorers science-informed citizens.
This program is an interactive talk show where our guest will answer questions from our host, Dr. Graham Lau, as well as questions submitted via Twitter, Facebook, and SAGANet chat.
For more information about this broadcast, visit the official website of Ask An Astrobiologist.
For more information about the Mars 2020 mission, visit the official NASA Mars 2020 mission website. | 
